Breeding Like Rabbits

by Ardyce C. Whalen

  The evening meal was never fancy—Hamburger Helper, macaroni and cheese, hot dogs and beans, always with a salad, sometimes just soup and salad. They really didn’t care too much what they ate—at least they didn’t complain. They were too busy talking about sports as they ate: hockey in the winter, baseball, tennis, and golf in the summer. That’s about all Britt can remember about that summer until the evening they had Hamburger Helper, the tuna one, the one Andy didn’t like, just once too often.

  Andy looked at his family seated at the dining room table or, as in the case of Sara and Tony, out of their chairs and poised to leave, and he said, “Enough! It’s time we had a family meeting.”

  His commanding tone stopped Sara in her tracks as she was making her way into the kitchen with her dirty dishes. It did the same with Tony, who was on his way upstairs, leaving his dirty dishes still on the table. They came back and sat down.

  “What’s the matter, Dad?” Tony said as he drummed his fingers on the table. “I gotta go to baseball practice.”

  “Later, Tony. We’ve got to find out what’s wrong with your mother—too much Hamburger Helper—something’s bothering her. She’s not herself.”

  Amy, who’d been discussing with Laura their plans for the evening, stuck out her tongue and pretended to gag and said, “I hate Hamburger Helper.”

  Daniel’s eyebrows lowered as he studied his mother with squinty eyes. Britt had been picking at her food, and now she just sat, busy pushing down the cuticles of her fingernails.

  Sara, frowning, looked at her mother. “Yes, Mom—what is the matter with you? You never get excited about anything—you never laugh, you just sleep.”

  Britt lifted her head and, looking at her oldest daughter, said, “Nothing is the matter. I’m just really tired.”

  “You know why you’re tired, Mom?” Laura decided to share her thoughts on the matter even though she was the youngest. “It’s because you don’t eat—you don’t eat your vegetables. You always tell me I have to eat my vegetables,”

  Andy nodded. “She’s right—you’re too skinny, Britt. You’ve got to eat more.”

  “But I’m not hungry. I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”

  “I could bake a cake for you—chocolate cakes are my specialty.” It sounded a bit like a joke, but Daniel wasn’t joking. He looked worried.

  “I miss the good stuff you used to make: meatloaf, scalloped potatoes, cherry pie, carrot cake, and especially spaghetti.” Andy scratched his head. “Why do you think you’re always so tired?”

  “I don’t know. I just am. You kids are all growing up so fast,” Brit looked at her children gathered around the table. “You have so many interests and are so busy. Pretty soon you won’t need me at all.”

  With that, Britt heard a chorus of “We need you!” Amy’s voice edged out the rest. “Mom, next year I’ll have to learn fractions. I need you to help me with my homework.”

  “We all need you, Britt—the old Britt,” said Andy. “You’re letting us down when you shut down like this; you’re like a zombie.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. She blinked to keep them from falling, but it only squeezed them out. “Just knowing that you care means a lot. Thank you. Maybe I’m afraid of the future—of what I see there, but shutting down won’t keep it from coming, I know that. Sleeping is just hiding. I’ll try to come back, but when you’re in a black hole, it’s hard to climb out. I will try, and I do love all of you.”

  Andy got up from the table and went to stand behind Britt. His hands rested on her shoulders. He bent down and kissed the top of her head. “Okay, kids, meeting’s over. You’re excused.”

  What was that noise? At six in the morning? Football players going to practice? Where had the summer gone? She’d better pull herself together.

  One of the first things she did when she was back at school was to see the school nurse, a hockey mother friend, about her swollen ankles. The school nurse, Maggie, took one look at her and then hugged her. “My goodness, you feel like a bony bird. Have you been sick?”

  Britt pulled up her right pants leg, slipped off her shoe, and rested her foot on a chair. “I’m all right, but I’ve never had such swollen ankles, and I thought maybe you’d know what’s wrong.” She looked up at Maggie.

  “You’re too skinny, for one thing. Didn’t you eat this summer?”

  “Not much. I was too tired, and I’d gained some weight eating at school, so I decided to slim down. Besides, most of my time was spent sleeping, so I didn’t need many calories.”

  “Slim down! You’re a stick. You probably didn’t eat any fat, and that’s why your ankles are swollen. Fat gives us energy; it’s actually necessary for survival! Too much fat—too much of anything—is bad, but a certain amount is needed for health. Some fats are better than others, so choose the good fats. If you feel you must cut down on calories, and you don’t, cut out sugar. It messes with your brain and rots your teeth. If you need to have something sweet, make your sweet honey and stay away from refined white stuff.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We both work full-time, and we’re both raising a houseful of kids. We need to keep healthy and strong, ya hear? Now go and eat something that has fat in it and eat regular meals. Sermon over, but do what I say—you’re my friend, and I don’t want to lose you. I mean that.”

  When summer came around again, Britt was almost back to her normal weight, and she felt healthy and strong. She never wanted to sleep away another summer. Time is all anyone has, and she’d wasted too much already. Britt enrolled in a summer art class. And she made a decision: when all their children had graduated from high school, she would leave Andy. They would both be free to find true partners—in Andy’s case, a woman who liked sports, and in hers, a person who read books and liked discussing them. It wouldn’t hurt, either, if he liked her artwork.

  Andy and I were once lovers and partners. We were close, but now we are separated by a divide so wide we can’t seem to cross it. Even Andy has said that he wishes we could communicate better. That surprised me—I didn’t think he cared. Maybe we could become partners and even lovers again. We love our five children—all different but all composed of our intermixed genetic material. Their bodies, minds, personalities are all combined in different ways, yet those ways come from our bodies, our minds. We love them all unconditionally, so why can’t we love each other?

  Though love has not been constant, trust in each other has, and that is a very big thing. Love is harder, especially if one person shows it in one way and the other person shows it in another. I need words, words of encouragement and appreciation and being told that I am loved. Andy shows love by his actions. He tries to anticipate needs and fulfill them. He’s a helper who enjoys the role; it makes him feel needed. He lives in the physical, which is why he thought he could bring us closer to each other again by sex.

  I live in the mind, imaging things, picturing things—I love solving puzzles. Once I learned that the words, “I’ll do it myself,” irritated Andy as much as they had always irritated my mother, I tried to be less independent, and things got better.

  Lying in bed one morning, Britt was struck with the thought that for much of her married life, she’d been living a lie. When she and Andy decided to marry, she imagined herself as being a courageous Daniel, the hero of her favorite Old Testament story. She’d go out into the world with her best friend by her side, a united front that could conquer anything. But she was not a Daniel. For one thing, she was not alone, and for another, she was not pure of heart. She didn’t even know for sure if she had married for love—perhaps she married to escape. She could have been the opposite of courageous—a coward afraid to make decisions for herself and afraid to go out into the world alone. She married a Catholic, a “mackerel snapper.” Her mother didn’t approve, and she doubted that her father did, even though he never said so. Was she trying to hurt her strict Lutheran moth
er? She tried much the same tactics on Andy once. It didn’t work.

  Britt loved to dance, but Andy didn’t; nevertheless, on one of their first dates, he took her to a dance. She wanted him to come in the hall and dance. He said she could go in, but he wanted to stay outside and talk with the guys. She didn’t dare go in alone. Someone gave her a bottle of peppermint schnapps. She can’t remember how much she drank, but she got sick. To this day, even the name makes her stomach queasy.

  As a married woman, she lied every Sunday when she went to the Catholic church. She didn’t believe that it was “the one true church,” though that was what she said when she recited the Nicene Creed. Why, there were more man-made rules in this religion than she’d ever imagined: women must cover their hair, men and women had to eat fish on Friday and fast before Communion and during Lent. She didn’t understand the reason for incense or for all those candles up front. The very worst rule was the one about birth control. The only acceptable method, other than abstinence, was the least reliable one.

  What did she believe anyway? She believed, or would like to believe, her father when he said, “I am the captain of my ship; I am the master of my soul.” She liked that. She believed the Jewish version of the golden rule: “Do not do unto others what you do not want them to do unto you.” Every time she faked an orgasm, she lied. A lie she had to live with because not to do so would cause pain. Pain, she believed, was an evil.

  Life is a balancing act in which you must try to figure out what causes the least pain and go with it. We can’t, like Daniel, escape the den—we all live in a den of sorts, surrounded by danger. God help us. And she did believe in God, the God she experienced as a child being comforted, loved, by a warm, enveloping presence—not an old man with a long white beard but a loving power. A power, a greatness, somewhat akin to what she felt when she stepped outside on a crisp winter night and looked up at the millions of stars. She could hardly breathe—it was so overwhelming and magnificent. She felt expanded and insignificant at the same time. All was in place, a perfectly balanced design. A design had a designer, and to her, that was God, or Yahweh, or Allah, or the Great Mystery. Britt also believed that the designer could change any elements that needed changing, a back to the drawing board, an out with the old, in with the new. At the rate humans were polluting the earth, using up its resources, she feared that humanity just might soon end up on that drawing board, or even the scrap pile to make way for a new and better design.

  CHAPTER

  24

  Britt’s second year of teaching junior high English was much better, but she welcomed the chance to escape her ninety-three students for three days in St. Paul by attending her first teaching convention. She looked up at the large banner stretched above the doors of the convention center: “MEA Convention—1971. She’d signed up by mail for a couple of workshops, and she wanted to find some new books to interest her students on Friday, the free reading day. She also wanted to look at the grammar workbooks—those she’d been using were so boring.

  She entered and was confronted with rows of booths or kiosks, plugging books of all kinds and other teaching supplies. Britt looked around. There must be thousands of people here, not counting those peddling something. When did this convention start? Let’s see, almost right after the Civil War started. The first one was held in Rochester—a little more than one hundred miles from here. It’s always the third weekend in October. Britt walked over to a table piled with American literary classics, or so said the banner hanging down from the front side of the table. She made her way through the crowd and soon stood in front of it.

  “Hmmm …” Not many of these suitable for seventh-grade readers. Too many big words or old words. I don’t want to turn them off reading. Some parents would probably object to the content of this one. She reached for Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and her hand closed on—another hand. Britt looked up, right into a pair of bright blue eyes. Only my dad and one other person have blue eyes that exact shade. “Jesse!”

  “Britt, Britt Anderson. I never thought I’d see you again. Are you a teacher? You said you never wanted to teach, that you were too shy to get up in front of a bunch of students.”

  “Yes, well, things change.” Why is he staring, and what is he thinking? Do I look okay?

  Jesse stood there, grinning at her, and then looked her up and down. “Maybe, but you don’t. You still look the same, but your hair is darker now.”

  Britt gave him a closer look. “You used to have a crew cut. I liked it, but for a teacher, this is better—longer and a little wavy. You look like one of the romantic poets—a starving romantic poet.” I sound like an idiot.

  “Let’s go grab a cup of coffee and talk. Where is that coffee bar? The last time I went to the MEA convention, it was downstairs.” He took her arm, and they left the big convention hall with its stacks of books and other exhibits.

  The coffee bar, warm and welcoming, was more than a bar. It had tables and smelled of fresh cinnamon rolls. A few people were in there, but Britt and Jesse found a table off to the side and away from the others. Jesse went up to the counter and brought back two steaming cups of coffee and two cinnamon rolls. Britt wrapped her icy finger around her cup to warm them.

  “Coffee, a teacher’s lifeblood. Ummm, and this is good coffee.” He swallowed, set down his cup, and looked across the table at her. “What do you teach, Britt?”

  “Junior high literature and grammar.”

  “Wow. I hope you’re getting hazardous duty pay?”

  “No, but I should be. And you?”

  “Freshman English at a community college in St. Cloud. Sometimes that can be hazardous too.” He smiled, his disarming, little boy smile, and her stomach ached, a good ache, and for a second or two she felt lightheaded.

  Britt’s coffee was cool enough to drink now, and she took a big gulp to clear her head. “I got your letter. I wanted to answer it, but I didn’t know what to say—how to say it. I’d dropped out of school, enrolled in a secretarial course in Minneapolis, and I married.”

  “Married!” Jesse’s eyebrows arched up, and his eyes opened wide. “Who did you marry? Do I know him?”

  “No. You never met him. He was my steady boyfriend in high school, my best friend. He still is my best friend. It—it was a very confusing time.”

  Jesse scratched his head. “I know what you mean. It was a mixed-up time for me too.” Britt’s hand was resting on the table, and Jesse reached over and laid his hand over hers. “I joined the army to prove to my father that I didn’t need him. I ended up freezing my butt off in Korea—nothing like almost freezing to death to get a guy to cool down. Joining up was a mistake, but there I was. I met my wife there, a beautiful Korean girl. We have two little daughters—she’s a great mother.”

  “And your mother?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “She died of cancer two years ago. We spend Christmas with my father. He’s still a judge, but he loves his little granddaughters—they can do no wrong. Other than at Christmas time, we don’t see him. He’s busy judging people.”

  “I don’t think I could have become a teacher without my father. We were visiting my parents, and I mentioned that I’d been thinking of going back to school. I said that I wanted to get a degree and a teacher’s certificate. Later that day, my father took me aside and told me that he’d bought war bonds during WWII so that he’d be able to send his children to college. I still had half my bonds, he said, and he’d cash them in and give me the money. I can never thank him enough.”

  “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s a barber—owns his own shop. He’s a good provider for me and our five children.”

  Startled, Jesse’s mouth dropped open, and his eyebrows arched up as they had when she told him she was married, but his eyes opened even wider than they had before. “Five children!”

  “Three girls and two
boys. Our oldest is in eleventh grade, and our youngest is in fourth. For a while there, I was worried about my sanity.” Britt looked down at her watch. “Oh, I have to go. I signed up for a workshop on Making Writing Fun in Junior High. My friend and roommate here, Delores—we drove up together—signed up for it too, and she’ll be looking for me, but it was so very good to see you again.” She stood up, coffee cup in hand.

  Jesse stood up too and reached for her arm. “There are no workshops tonight, and everyone has to eat. I know a little place not far from here where the food is good and they have a live band playing songs of the fifties. They even have a little dance floor. Let’s meet at four thirty at the table where we were both reaching for the same book. We have some catching up to do.”

  “Dancing to songs of the fifties! I’d love that. I can’t remember the last time I danced to anything. I can’t pass that up. I’ll be at the book table at four thirty with my dancing shoes on.”

  It was three thirty, and the writing workshop, a good one, was over. Britt was in the hotel room, trying to decide what to wear. She hadn’t planned on an evening out, but she knew a banquet was planned, so she did have something nice, her clingy, jersey jumpsuit, empire style to enhance what little chest she had. She loved the swirl of color—rust, peach, and forest green, and it never wrinkled. The wider legs made it look like a long, A-line skirt—dressy yet perfect for dancing. Britt slipped on her T-strap dancing shoes—the real thing, tap-dancing shoes without the taps, and oh so comfortable. On her way out, she grabbed her warm peach shawl, just in case, even though this October day was warmer than usual. In the evening, who knows? One never knew what Minnesota weather would be like.